Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1)

by Hollyday, Thomas

  “You think I’m kind of hardened?”

  She didn’t answer him directly. “My mother and father were flower children. The only reason they stopped living in a shack in the woods was that I was getting older, needed to go to school, needed clothes and shoes. There were other families there. We ran around naked in the summer. It was like a village. I remember the ramshackle house that my father built, like a painting with all the strange colors and the octagonal windows. Then, my father gave up on the lifestyle. He started wearing shoes. He went to work in a hardware store and was so good at it that the day came when he bought out the owner. Even then he managed to give away goods to poor people. He never chased people for bills that they owed. My mother was the same, so wonderfully competent and perfectly willing to spend her energy on anybody who needed her.”

  Frank smiled. “Maggie, I never even knew my parents’ real name. They changed it after they came to the United States. They are both dead so I guess I’ll never know. I think they helped to kill a lot of German soldiers during the war.” He brushed intently at a spot of dark soil.

  “They took the name of Light when they were allowed to emigrate to this country,” he continued. “The name was in a copy of the music for the Star Spangled Banner. My mother learned the song. She liked where it said the “dawn’s early light.” My family name was from the song and then my first name was after President Franklin Roosevelt. I don’t remember them ever telling me the original European names. They never even talked their old language.”

  “Why?”

  “They hated the place they came from. Whatever home they had was destroyed in the war. They had been fighters, probably underground soldiers. Their bodies were covered with scars. Their wounds caused them serious medical problems when I was growing up. They had a pass to go to the Veterans Hospital. I would ask them but they never told me how they got the scars.

  “My father had a big knife that he kept in a box in their bedroom closet. I sneaked a look at it one time and I thought I saw stains on the blade. I grew up thinking that those were bloodstains from when my father killed enemy soldiers.

  “One night my mother was drinking wine and talking a lot. She told me about a night during the war when a great number of children were freed from a concentration camp near her village. The camp had been attacked by the underground. After the children ran into the woods, three guards were killed by hand to hand combat by a village man and his wife. The couple then had to flee soldiers who hunted them for months. She began to tell how the man and woman almost starved to death and how the woman’s own baby died of hunger. My father told her to stop talking, that he did not want to hear the story. The next day, I went to look at that knife again but it was gone. I never saw it again.

  “My father was a cabinetmaker. I have some of his furniture. Beautiful. He was an artist. She was too. She helped him build the furniture. I remember when their customers used to come to the house and sit in the kitchen and talk about the furniture. They had many wealthy clients. I overheard my father asking one of them to write a letter to help me get into college. My father would never tell me about things like that. He did not like to admit that he ever took a favor from anyone.

  “My parents were the reason I went into history as a career. They owned every book they could buy about the United States. They taught me about this country, about American history. Every day when I was little they would quiz me about America, about the Presidents, about the American heroes. To them everything the country did was right. Europe was always wrong.”

  “Later I got into archaeology. I began to find out that what actually happened here was very different from the history that had been written. Heroes were really scoundrels, and scoundrels were really heroes. Archaeology didn’t lie. It laid bare how people actually behaved. There was no argument with an artifact hidden under the soil that no one has tampered with. I did not talk with my parents about my discoveries in archeology. They were happy with their own view of history.”

  “Then Vietnam came,” Maggie said.

  “My parents were very patriotic. They thought it was their duty to support me going to the war. My parents insisted it was a just war because they believed simply that the United States was always right. Maybe I thought too much about my mother’s story of those children escaping the concentration camp. Anyway I convinced myself I had to go to Vietnam.”

  “My folks,” Maggie said, “could never decide which side was right, which one to cheer for. It was against their nature to choose. In the beginning I worked for the Viet Cong in the student marches at my school. My parents would watch and look sad about it all. Then when the soldiers came home and some of them were so terribly wounded I worked in the Veterans hospital helping out. They were sad about that too.”

  She smiled. “Maybe my flower children parents are why I like flowers so much. Children too. I like children.” She looked at Frank.

  “I like roses,” said Frank. “I respect them.”

  “Why?”

  “They overcome the thorns.”

  “You have something to learn about roses,” Maggie said

  The Pastor called, “Should we try to lift out these soldier bones?”

  “No, leave them. Come help me here. We need to work on the shipwreck itself. We can come back to that area if there’s time.” Frank scratched his neck. “That waterman, Soldado, said he would be here to take us down the river.”

  “You think looking at those other wrecks might help figure out this one?”

  “I’d like to see what those hulls look like. That could help us direct our work to the best spots on this wreck.”

  They worked silently for a while, the Pastor digging at the opposite corner from Frank. The Pastor spoke first, “Let me tell you about my family. When my father and mother were let go from Peachblossom, we moved back to River Sunday. We lived upstairs at the church where I preach. My father and mother were hired as the custodians. He cleaned the place, repaired it, and she cooked for the itinerant preachers. Then my parents died suddenly. My brother and me were taken care of by the visiting preachers and some of the church members who looked in on us. They did all they could for us but they had their own families to take care of. It was cold in that old church. In those days there was not much insulation just boards on the walls. In the summer there were all kinds of bugs. We got along except that we were always hungry. Most of the time my brother would steal some of the food left out on Sunday morning for the church breakfast. He would sneak it back up stairs and hide it and he would share the food with me during the week. At first I wouldn’t eat any of it because I said we shouldn’t be stealing. I said that the preachers had told us not to steal. Then I got too hungry at night and I started to eat.

  “My brother, Lincoln, had an idea that Jake would give us some food. He thought that because Jake was a little kid and little kids care a lot about other people, that he would be generous. Lincoln figured we could get enough food for a week. So we set off in the morning, walked all the way out to the island and up to the big house and knocked on the door. It was cold, I am telling you. A wet wind was blowing hard off the river, and my feet were just about frozen in some old red rubber boots I had. My brother was cold too but he stood there and rang that front doorbell over and over. He wouldn’t give up.

  “Finally the big old wood paneled door opened just a crack and we saw Jake peering out at us, his arm reached over his head like this.” The Pastor demonstrated with his arm stretched upward. “That arm, you see, was holding the doorknob. Jake, he smiled at us through the crack and said, ‘What you want, Lincoln?’

  “My brother said, ‘Jake, we’re hungry and we want some food.’

  “So Jake said, ‘All right, you wait here,’ and he closed the door. Just closed the door. We waited there in that cold for this little fellow to come back. My brother was smiling then like he had won something.

  “Byembye Jake comes back to the door. We hear him turning the knob inside and then it opens up
a little bit more. Jake’s hand comes out in the cold air and in the palm of his hand is a handful of corn flakes. Then he says, ‘You better not eat too much because I’ve heard my father say that black folks won’t work when they got too much food in their bellies.’ Then he drops the food on the snow on the step and slams the door. Well, my brother, he looks at me and we both reach down and pick up every one of those flakes and just gobble them down we were so hungry. Then we set off for home. My brother told me then he said he knew I was cold but that he was warmed up by his hating Jake.”

  Maggie nodded.

  “I lost my brother a year after that. He got caught stealing food by one of the preachers and he was thrown out of the church building. He went off to Baltimore and I heard in a while that he died up there in the children’s jail. That was the end of my family till my wife come along.”

  The Pastor brushed at the ground with one of the excavating brushes. “I thought about that all my life, that kid and his corn flakes.”

  He paused. “I’m hopeful though,” he said softly. “Always hopeful. People around here might just surprise me. They may turn on Jake, throw him out of town with all his money. Just tell him they don’t want it. One of these days they might.”

  Frank pointed to a hard curved object coming out of the soil under his scraping. He was working into a new area. “Test pit Q is finally showing something. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more. This is right where the main cargo hold should be.”

  “What did you find?” asked the Pastor, as he leaned closer to Frank, trying to see.

  “It’s a pipestem, part of an old clay tobacco pipe.”

  “What does it tell us?”

  “Could have belonged to a sailor. Here, we can date the pipe with some precision.” Frank reached in his pocket for a small steel ruler. “OK,” he said as he measured the bore. “You see, Pastor, there was a fellow named Binford who developed a formula for archeologists to date tobacco pipes. Pipe bores got smaller from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. So if I measure this bore,” he calculated some figures on a piece of paper, “Then multiply a formula, Binford tells me the age of the pipe.” He paused as he looked at the paper. “Well, this is not very helpful for you, Pastor.”

  “Why?” said the Pastor.

  “This pipe is dated about 1700.”

  “The slave graveyard,” said Maggie.

  “I see what you mean,” said the Pastor. “Slaves were not imported into the Eastern Shore until then. For this to be their graveyard it would have to be dated later, 1720, maybe 1750, giving them time to live for a while then die. The strata where we’re digging is too old for a graveyard.”

  “The pipe is not definitive. We’ll keep looking. It does tell us about the ship in here. It’s an old wreck if I’m reading this pipe correctly.”

  The tawny cat reappeared and was standing at the edge of Frank’s area.

  “Cat knows something we don’t,” said the Pastor.

  “That cat understands it’s too hot to work,” joked Frank.

  “Cat might know more than you think,” said the Pastor, staring at the animal and leaning down to stroke its light orange fur. The cat purred. Frank stood up. “I’ll get the camera and take a record shot of the clay pipe in its site.” He set the fragment back into the soil strata where it had been. “Say, I just thought of something.”

  “What?” said Maggie.

  “Maybe that tobacco smoke I smelled came from this pipe.”

  Maggie threw a handful of muck at him and he ducked, laughing. The cat jumped into the pit and sniffed at the pipe, rubbed against Frank’s bare leg for a moment and then bounded away into the high grass.

  “One thing I learned from my father,” said Maggie, watching the cat and Frank. “If an animal likes you, you’re probably all right.”

  Chapter 7

  It was the time of day when the heat was so heavy the insects did not move. Maggie, Frank, and the Pastor watched as Soldado drifted his craft into a mooring. Their hands tried to shield their eyes against the brilliant river glare.

  “If Soldado said he’d be here, I was pretty sure he’d come.”

  The Pastor continued, “He’ll take us out around the island. You can get an idea of the land here. Then we’ll come up on the wrecks from down the river .”

  As they prepared to wade out to the boat, Frank asked the Pastor, “Tell me more about Soldado.”

  “Soldado goes back a long time around here. Most of that time he’s hated Jake Terment. Soldado and his mother used to live out on the island. It was a little house, tar paper walls, just a mile or so over the bridge. His mother came from Mexico. The Yucatan. She was a very beautiful woman when she was younger. Very tall. She worked in one of the Terment migrant labor farms. Soldado was born in the camp. Some say his father came from around River Sunday. Some even say it was Mister Terment himself. Jake’s father did provide her the little house, helped her with her citizenship. Of course, Mister Terment never really let go of anything he gave. The house had a large mortgage.

  “We were all kids together, growing up on the Island. When Soldado was a teenager, he was a lot bigger than the rest of us, me, Jake, Billy, the other kids that we played around with. Soldado knew stories of famous sailing ships . He wanted to go to China, he said. He used to make up games. He’d pretend to be the captain of a clipper ship and we were the crew. Then we’d go into his warm house and his mother would make us molasses sandwiches, nodding her head with a toss of her black hair and smiling at Soldado making up all these ship stories.”

  The Pastor smiled. “There were these ship models in his house. Jake wanted to be captain too but in those days we could vote for who we wanted and we always chose Soldado. Of course Jake didn’t like anyone being in charge over him so he and Soldado were always fighting. Jake was smaller and Soldado used to just hold him by the shoulder and let him flail his fists at the air. One day Jake sneaked into Soldado’s house when no one was home. He broke one of the models. Then he went and showed some of the pieces to Soldado. That model sat inside the front door on a yellow, black and white table and it was Soldado’s favorite. You should have seen it, Frank. Anyway I think that was the last time the two of them even tried to get along, playing or anything else. Soldado threw Jake hard against the wall. The nails holding on the tarpaper cut Jake’s face. That was how he got that scar over his eye.”

  “In a few years Soldado went off to the merchant marine. He was on a ship that got sunk during a typhoon. He helped save some of his fellow sailors . The town of River Sunday gave him a parade when he came home. I remember seeing him in the convertible with Miss River Sunday, the high school girl who won the Fire Department beauty contest that year. All the ministers of the white churches and the mayor were there in cars too. Maybe there might have been one or two black preachers too. Not me, you can be sure. In those days, my church was outlawed by both the blacks and the whites. After a while Soldado went back to sea and commanded freighters for a long time. He finally retired and came home. That’s when he and Jake went at it again. Jake’s company was buying up the land. Jake’s father had died and Jake wanted all the island. The development had not been planned yet. Jake was just doing what he always did, trying to control everything. Anyway, Soldado didn’t want to sell. For one thing his mother was getting right along. He wanted her to live out her time on the island. Jake’s people wouldn’t go away. They found a way to get the property anyway by taking over the old mortgage at the bank. They found a way to push for payment, money that Soldado and his mother couldn’t handle. Soldado was not alone in getting bought out. Jake’s company found mortgages on tractors or buildings that they could foreclose and then forced sales of many farms out there. I heard that folks mysteriously had their dairy cattle get sick and die or their chicken houses catch fire. Soldado didn’t have a lot of cash. His retirement was a pension from the steamship company that he had served with. He had been a captain when he retired and he had saved fairly good money, but i
t wasn’t enough to handle paying off his mother’s mortgage. Terment’s father had made that mortgage on the shack so big there was no way Soldado and his mother could clear it. So the day came when Jake moved him out. Jake even came down to River Sunday that morning to see the job done and stood right on Soldado’s porch while Soldado had to pack his stuff, the models, everything, and take it out of the old house. Jake was there with Billy and three or four other police officers. Jake gave the house to the River Sunday fire department to burn down, to use for a practice house fire to train their new volunteer fire fighters.

  “A few months later Soldado’s mother died. He blames Jake for her death. Says losing that little house, as poor as it was, broke her heart. These days, he lives off his pension and has his water finding business. Like most of the men around here he does a little crabbing and oystering. He has a room he rents in River Sunday but most of the time he lives on his boat. I’m one of the few folks he still talks to. He says that all the people in River Sunday work one way or another for Jake Terment.”

  They came to the side of the boat. Soldado was on his knees working on the engine, the engine cover on its side to the left of him. He did not look up.

  “I was over to your site and made some marks where you might want to dig,” he said.

  “We noticed,” said Frank. “We appreciate your help. We want to thank you for taking us up to see the old ships.” Soldado still did not look up.

  The salt smell of the river mixed with the odor of rotting seaweed. That stink drifted around them in the heat. Soldado walked over to the side of the boat where the steering lever was located. He pressed a small black button and the engine turned over and began its slow throb. Exhaust smoke puffed from the tall stack into the air above the boat. Then the smoke, as slight as it was, drifted down on Frank and the others, and mixed a new pungency with the river smell.

  Maggie sneezed.